Ikuo Takeuchi

The RoboCup-Rescue project: a robotic approach to the disaster mitigation problem

This paper introduces the RoboCup-Rescue Simulation Project, a contribution to the disaster mitigation, search and rescue problem. A comprehensive urban disaster simulator is constructed on distributed computers. Heterogeneous intelligent agents such as fire fighters, victims and volunteers conduct search and rescue activities in this virtual disaster world. A real world interface integrates various sensor systems and controllers of infrastructures in the real cities with the virtual world. Real-time simulation is synchronized with actual disasters, computing complex relationship between various damage factors and agent behaviors. A mission-critical man-machine interface provides portability and robustness of disaster mitigation centers, and augmented-reality interfaces for rescue parties in real disasters. It also provides a virtual reality training function for the public. This diverse spectrum of RoboCup-Rescue contributes to the creation of the safer social system.

A list processing language TAO with multiple programming paradigms

This paper describes an interpreter-centered list processing language TAO which supports the logic programming paradigm and the object-oriented programming paradigm together with the conventional procedural programming paradigm in the framework of the Lisp language. TAO allows the user to mix these programming paradigms in solving complicated and multifaceted AI problems. The fundamentals of these programing paradigms, namely, unification, message passing and function call can nest each other in an expression. Thus, the user can use the result of a function call or a message passing in a unification straightforwardly and vice versa. TAO also supports the concurrent programming. The implementation of the TAO interpreter on a Lisp machine called ELIS achieves a remarkable efficiency.

TAO: A fast interpreter-centered system on LISP machine ELIS

This paper describes the design issue, implementation and performance of a Lisp called TAO for the Lisp machine ELIS. TAO is a dialect of Lisp which unifies an object-oriented programming paradigm and a logic programming paradigm with a procedural programming paradigm. Since the interpreter is implemented fully by microcode, interpreted code runs faster than most of other dedicated machines.

RoboCup-Rescue: an international cooperative research project of robotics and AI for the disaster mitigation problem

This paper introduces the RoboCup-Rescue Simulation Project, a contribution to the disaster mitigation, search and rescue problem. A comprehensive urban disaster simulator is constructed on distributed computers. Heterogeneous intelligent agents such as fire fighters, victims and volunteers conduct search and rescue activities in this virtual disaster world. A real world interface integrates various sensor systems and controllers of infrastructures in the real cities with the real world. Real-time simulation is synchronized with actual disasters, computing complex relationship between various damage factors and agent behaviors. A mission-critical man-machine interface provides portability and robustness of disaster mitigation centers, and augmented-reality interfaces for rescue in real disasters. It also provides a virtual- reality training function for the public. This diverse spectrum of RoboCup-Rescue contributes to the creation of the safer social system.

A massively multi-agent simulation system for disaster mitigation

We introduce two Japanese national projects on disaster mitigation which seriously involve massively multi-agent simulation system. We describe a simulation integration architecture that combines various natural phenomena and huge number of human activities to estimate and predict a complicated disaster progress and countermeasures effects. We describe the state of the art of our system design and implementation related mainly about multi-agent programming. Finally, we discuss about the rationale of massively multi-agent simulation for the purpose of disaster mitigation.

Design and implementation of the kernel and agents for the RoboCup-Rescue

As a new branch of RoboCup, RoboCup-Rescue has been proposed, which simulates and evaluates real time multi-agent cooperative rescue activities in a disaster. The paper describes our prototype design and implementation of the RoboCup-Rescue Simulation System, and illustrates some prototypical agents running on this system.

Rescue simulation and its road map

There are involved a number of general technical problems in a rescue simulation project for mitigation of large scale disasters. First, we overview how the rescue simulation will be meaningful and valuable in conjunction with real world disasters. Then we clarify the technical problems to be solved to develop a really usable, state-of-the-art rescue simulation system. But a more important point is that such a rescue simulation system should be so constructed so that it is not very special with respect to the ordinary daily works of local government offices. All of these are challenging problems, so that we have in mind a feasible road map to attack them in a proper order to be able to have a good outcome.

The distributed simulation of RoboCup Rescue version 1

Integrated disaster simulation systems are important tools to decrease the damage from various disasters. The paper describes the version 1 of the RoboCup Rescue simulation system, which integrates sub-simulators such as a seismic intensity simulator and a fire simulator, and divides, for scalability, the simulated world into a number of local regions, each of which is simulated by one computer in a cluster.

YabAI: The First Rescue Simulation League Champion

RoboCupRescue project aims to simulate large urban disasters. In order to minimize damage resulting from disasters, various rescue agents try to accomplish their missions in the disaster space in the simulation system. Ability of an individual agent, however, is utterly insufficient. Agents need to cooperate with other same and different types utilizing as little communication as possible under stringently limited visual sensory information. Our YabAI team, however, successfully implemented effective cooperations under this limitation.

Firmware approach to fast Lisp interpreter

The approach to speed up a Lisp interpreter by implementing it in firmware seems promising. A microcoded Lisp interpreter shows good performance for very simple benchmarks, while it often fails to provide good performance for larger benchmarks and applications unless speedup techniques are devised for it. This was the case for the TAO/ELIS system. This paper describes various techniques devised for the TAO/ELIS system in order to speed up the interpreter of the TAO language implemented on the ELIS Lisp machine. The techniques include data type dispatch, variable access, function call and so on. TAO is not only upward compatible with Common Lisp, but also incorporates logic programming, object-oriented programming and Fortran/C-like programming into Lisp programming. TAO also provides concurrent programming and supports multiple users (up to eight users). The TAO interpreter for those programming paradigms is coded fully in microcodes. In spite of rich functionalities, the speed of interpreted codes of TAO is comparable to that of compiled codes of commercial Lisp machines. Furthermore, the speeds of the interpreted codes of the same program written in various programming paradigms in TAO does not differ so much. This speed balance is very important for the user. Another outstanding feature of the TAO/ELIS system is its firmware development environments. Micro Assembler and Linker are written in TAO, which enables the user to use the capability of TAO in microcodes. Since debugging tools are also written in a mini-Lisp, many new tools were developed in parallel to debugging of microcodes. This high level approach to firmware development environments is very important to provide high productivity of development.